Gender & Language in Video Games - Q&A with Dr Frazer Heritage
Gender & Language in Video Games – How people responded to the inclusion of World of Warcraft’s first transgender character
Dr Frazer Heritage, a lecturer in Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, has been conducting research into how gender & sexuality is represented within video games. Part of his studies has been to use computation linguistic methods, to look at how people responded to the inclusion of World of Warcraft’s first transgender character. Today, OMG sits down with Dr Frazer, to learn more about his research and findings.
Hi Dr Frazer, nice to meet you, could you please start by just introducing yourself and your research topic at Manchester Metropolitan University?
Hello, and thank you for having me! It’s lovely to be here and talking to OMG. Of course I’m more than happy to introduce myself: my name is Dr Frazer Heritage, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. I mostly research how language is used in videogames and in videogame communities. In my research, I focus on how we use language to construct representations of gender and sexuality. So, if you’ve ever played massive games like Skyrim or The Witcher, the characters have a huge amount of spoken dialogue – and there are loads of additional texts like books, posters, and notes that players can read. What I like to do is gather all of that language into what we call a corpus (the plural of which are called corpora) and run statistical analyses on it all. We can also do this on data which comes from places such as online forums. Once we have this data, we can do things such as look at what words are statistically likely to occur with terms like ‘man’, ‘woman’, or ‘nonbinary’. Alternatively, we can use methodologies associated with corpus linguistics to look at what sexuality labels occur in the data (and if they do, what words they occur with). Once we see what the statistical patterns say, I also like to look at how those words are used in context and try to see patterns in how they are used at both a quantitative and qualitative level. It’s kind of a cross between big-data math-based language analysis and super close reading to understanding how particular terms are used on a much more fine-grain level.
Sometimes, though, what I also find is that those labels don’t really occur in videogames, so there’s a lot of work to be done looking at how we can see patterns around how we talk about both gender and sexuality in videogames and how we can use large corpora to do those kinds of analysis. More recently, I’ve been turning to doing work looking at the representation of transgender characters, both in videogames and communities associated with them.
Can we ask, what was it that compelled you to focus your research on the representation of gender and sexuality across different forms of media, social media and video games?
This is a really good question, and one which has a few interconnected answers. At a really broad level, I think the reason why I wanted to study the relationship between language and gender within different forms of media, videogames included, stems from being queer myself (I use ‘queer’ in the reclaimed sense here, of course). I think for many LGBTQ+ people, we see (and experience) prejudice every day. For me at least, experiencing that prejudice comes with a desire to understand and challenge it. I think as well, I would rather look at ways of challenging such representations because they’re things that others can change relatively easily – and ideally, I want to be able to work with people to help change those representations for the better. So, in a sense, I guess doing research on language, gender, and sexuality always feel a little bit close to my own identities.
But thinking particularly of that kind of research in relation to videogames, I’ve always played videogames - ever since I was about 4 or 5 years old - and I’ve always loved them. (Without revealing my age, that’s a fair few year I’ve been gaming!). But I also have a deep family connection to videogames: I have an older sister and while I was in my last few years of school, she started working for a videogame company in our hometown. She has stayed with videogame companies for a good while now too and it was something I always admired. So, I always felt some connection to the gaming industry, even if I knew I didn’t have the skills to make the games myself.
What really made me interested in studying videogames as an academic discipline was during 2014 when I first saw the #Gamergate movement. I remember I was in studying in Japan at the time and a bit isolated from the gaming communities in the UK that I would regularly play with (both online and in person). I remember seeing #Gamergate happening and was very confused (and had very few people I could actually talk to about it). All I really had was Twitter to see #Gamergate and I was somewhat surprised at some of the statements people made – especially around this kind of objection to equality in gaming. I should also really preface this by saying that I know this wasn’t all gamers – and that actually many gamers (including the readership of OMG) are pushing for more equality in gaming – but I think it was just a shock to see how many were against it. So, basically, while reading some of the Tweets about #Gamergate, I thought an interesting project would be to look at how ideologies towards gender were constructed online. At the time, though, I was dipping my toes into a different branch of linguistics, and I didn’t think I’d be able to fully explore the topic – so I kind of shelved the idea.
While on my Masters by research, I was constantly thinking about the topic. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to do a bit more work on gender and the language of gaming, so I started delving into a little more research on the topic. While looking at what had been done in more depth, I kept finding that people were talking about doing research on the language used IN ‘x’ game, but actually would look at the language AROUND ‘x’ game. (So, for example, people would say they looked at the language in Lara Croft but would look at the language used in game reviews of Lara Croft). This kind of irked me – but I quickly came to find that very little work had been done looking at the language in games, and what had didn’t really look at gender and sexuality. So, I very quickly found my niche and decided that I wanted to do a PhD in it.
I was really fortunate to have a great PhD supervisor who was really encouraging (and also played videogames), and I soon came to find that there were so many methodological considerations and new discoveries to be made through the analysis of the language in games that I became hooked very quickly. Every time I play a game now, I see bits of language and I want to do broader analyses to see if that’s a pattern. So, for example, I was playing Classic World of Warcraft when it first came out and saw some language which I was surprised made it into the game. So, I thought that might be an interesting pattern to explore in more detail.
Ultimately, noticing all of those interesting bits of language led me to writing a book, where I looked at a huge range of games and explored how they represent gendered characters (with a smaller focus on sexuality). In that book, I ended up finding that there are so many interesting things around gender and sexuality – but a really good takeaway from it was that representations have pretty significantly changed over the last 10 or so years. We’re definitely beginning to see much better representation of gender and sexuality in videogames, and I think that’s something that needs to be lauded.
We understand that you conducted some research around World of Warcraft, can you talk to us a little bit about how that came about and why?
I’ve done two bits of work on World of Warcraft (WoW) so far, but I think it’s probably best to talk about the work I did around how players of WoW spoke about the game’s first transgender character, Pelagos. So, some of the key literature in the field of language and videogames was published in the early 2010s and looked at how people on the official Blizzard forums spoke about feminists and LGBTQ+ people. They found that many people on these forums were both anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+. So, what I thought would be a good idea would be to see whether or not attitudes have changed in the last 10 or so years, and to see how this character was represented.
Blizzard really did make a step towards equality by including Pelagos – there really are very few openly transgender characters in videogames (as evidenced by the data from LGBTQ Video Game Archive). But I also had a few issues with the representation – for example, unless you’re in a very small proportion of the player base, you don’t actually find out he’s transgender. So, I was also interested to see who had an issue with him being transgender, if people had noticed, or if this method of making the representation harder to access had been picked up on.
In terms of the findings of the research was there anything that surprised you?
I think the thing that really surprised me was actually how pro-transgender inclusion many of the posters to the forum were. So, what I saw was that the majority of posters actually argued with transphobic people and really stook up for LGBTQ+ inclusion.
When we think of video games, we might sometimes think the worst, but actually it was really lovely to see just how positively the community reacted to trans inclusion and how swift people were to call out bigotry. I also noted a fair few instances where people were sometimes critical of the inclusion – not because they didn’t agree with transgender inclusion in games, but because companies sometimes put these characters in but will do other problematic things related to gender and sexuality (like operate in countries where there are still anti-LGBTQ+ laws).
I would also see a lot of the people who were for the inclusion of transgender characters would kind of build on each other’s comments and support each other – such as saying how they appreciated other people calling out bigotry. This didn’t really happen with those who were against including LGBTQ+ characters in games – they very much had isolated posts which were significantly longer in length – but often people who might have agreed with those views didn’t interact with each other.
Something I also found, which was surprising, was that even transphobic commentors didn’t misgender the character. It was interesting to see how even people who explicitly marked themselves as TERFS (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) still used the correct pronouns for Pelagos (he/him). There were only two instances in the entire threads where he was misgendered – and one of which was when someone was asking for clarification. I think part of that might be introducing a character from the get-go as being trans and only using those pronouns for them from the first time they’re introduced.
Were there any learning into best practises or recommendations on how developers can include LGBTQ+ and perhaps specifically trans characters in games? And if so, how are you going about ensuring developers, etc learn about and can access and use these findings?
This is a really good question and one that I struggle with quite a lot. As an academic, I tend to just do the research and have less experience with the implementation side – so whatever I do say here, please take with a pinch of salt!
I think the first thing is that we need more openly LGBTQ+ characters, and in particular trans characters, who are central to story lines and who tell people their identities. This can be implicit, or something which I don’t really see in videogames, is explicit representation. In some of the work I’m currently doing looking at how we identify transgender characters in videogames, we typically see those characters talking about things like “what was or was not in their pants”. What the data from my research suggested was that players appreciated seeing openly LGBTQ+ people in games, so we might need to think about how we include those. So, I think some more work is needed on how we represent transgender (as well as LGBTQ+) people – in particular, how we include their coming out narratives in authentic ways that don’t leave ambiguity and how we let players know that these kinds of people exist.
A few videogame companies may be afraid of the negative backlash from including transgender characters, but what my research suggests is that this is a somewhat vocal minority. While I also appreciate that there may have been some content moderation from Blizzard before I got to the data, looking at different discussions also pointed to a broader picture of a number of players being for trans inclusion more broadly – so I would argue that it might be time to include more trans characters across more games.
Something I’ve also noticed a lot of LGBTQ+ communities make commentary on is when videogame companies do the bare minimum for LGBTQ+ rights and often in a way which still makes them money. So, quite often you may see several videogame companies just change their social media logos for Pride month and then never really do much else to help LGBTQ+ rights. Or they may run a ‘sale’ in their online shop, which means they still profit and only give 50% to LGBTQ+ charities. For many online LGBTQ+ communities, this doesn’t quite sit right – and often feels like companies are trying to profiteer off social movements, like pride month. I think something which needs to be done is that LGBTQ+ representation and support needs to be embedded in videogame companies from the ground up – so that’s including LGBTQ+ characters, who are authentic and open about their sexuality, that’s donating money to LGBTQ+ charities (without the expectation that it will bring profit), and campaigning for equal rights all year round.
At the minute, it’s quite difficult to really get the message out to videogame companies about the findings of my work – I’ve done some blog posts before and written a few non-academic articles but making the connections with videogame companies has proven to be quite difficult. It’s not for lack of trying – when I was doing my PhD, I reached out to some videogame companies but just never heard back from them. I’ve been fortunate more recently and I’ve managed to make a few in-roads which I’m in the early stages of developing further, but I’m always up for more collaborations and I’m hoping to establish some more of them as my research grows. (So if you’re reading this and thinking about how you could do some work on the language around gender/sexuality in your game – please do let me know!). Academia and industry can seem like two very different worlds, and quite often it can be hard to come to a nice harmony between them, but I definitely think there’s value in that (both in terms of industry guiding academia and vice-versa).
We see your next piece is to look at other videogames with trans characters, to explore how they are represented across a boarder range of games. Can you give us a little insight into how that’s progressing and what you’ve discovered so far?
Of course, and thanks for asking! So, I alluded to some of this earlier, but I’m using data from LGBTQ Video Game Archive to look at what is tagged as ‘explicit’ trans representation within games. What I’m currently interested in is how players come to be aware that a character is explicitly transgender. While games are usually quite a visual object, I’m more interested in what’s said (and how this works with the visuals). So, for example, do the characters tell the player ‘oh yeah, I’m trans’ or anything to that effect. (The same can be applied to other gender/sexuality labels).
What I’ve been finding is that the only times those kinds of terms are really used is when it’s other characters talking about the transgender character. So, it might be a third character telling the player about another character’s gender identity. I’ve been finding a lot of issues around the methodological approaches to looking at transgender representation in games – particularly when coming out narratives use really implicit language. What I’m finding is that in addition to a lack of representation, we (as researchers) need to begin to rethink how we approach analysing transgender representation in games.
While that’s my starting point (and likely to be a single academic paper), the next step of the research would be to try and consult transgender people who have played similar games or may have had similar experiences. Basically, the next stage is to make sure that trans voices aren’t lost in the interpretation of these findings. It could be the case that these seem authentic to transgender people, or they may seem overly contrived. I’m very aware that when we’re talking about the representation of a particular group, we should also try to incorporate that group’s views where possible – so that’s definitely a perspective I’m going to try bring in once the ground work is all laid out.
Finally thank you for your time today, it has been great to speak with you!
Thank you so much for having me!
Out Making Games
James Wright
